A Literacy, Technology Reflection

I tried to make a meta-flight-simulator from and Airstream respirator, some sound effect, and the A/C blowing, centered around an office chair and an Apple IIe—my mother refused to play the aircraft game & opted for Apple Panic, a strategy game like Dig-Dug. I didn’t know then that the terminal was just another piece of home furnishings & discarded industrial jetsam. I didn’t know we were do lucky, affluent, still behind any edge of technology, but far above the curve for other households. I know now we couldn’t afford it, and that my father believed it was much more important to have a system in the house for me to learn on than that we go out to eat more than a couple times a year.

Like one of Selfe & Hawisher’s interview subjects, I learned to come out of my shell and make small talk with other boys and girls and, and less often men and women with IRC clients, when AOL and CompuServe were the two choices for dial-up connectivity.

The Imagination Network, the Sierra game company’s INN, brought me others’ avatars to play chess and Othello with. Instead of becoming more cloistered and hermetic when networking was limited to other antisocial kids and collegiate whizzes, the early Internet brought me up to a level of acceptable social communication and kept me from putting my faux pas in my mouth every third exchange. I’m seventh grade, I took a girl from the INN server out to a movie and tried to leave after I saw her but before I met her. Ten years later I had another Internet rendezvous, and before she left she stole the radio out of my car.

In teaching, I’m caught between resolving technologies and preventing my students from using online resources exclusively. I borrow rampantly from the net while preaching to my students the need to keep their noses in books. [This is a problem especially in small branch campuses, where we essentially have computer labs linked to the main library and a footling book selection.]

I have precisely one friend who is not online: no email address, no spreadsheets—who still writes out invoices in triplicate with carbon paper. I wonder, at his age and mine, who has squandered more time on technology or the lack of it. I believe his day has more hours in it than mine.

My old job was insurance, and when the middle managers declared, “Guess what!? We’re going paperless!” our office manager stopped at Office Depot on the way back from the meeting, saying, “Trust me. This will only increase our need to keep every piece of paper that crosses our desk.”